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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Old at Heart? New Tool Calculates Heart's True Age

An image shows a human heart with a cardiogram

A new tool helps even young people to estimate their risk for heart
disease later in life, by calculating their heart's true age.

People's familial and lifestyle risk factors today contribute to their
heart health when they get older, and should be considered when
estimating their heart disease risk,
according to new recommendations by researchers from several British
medical societies, published today (March 25) in the BMJ journal Heart.

Current prevention strategies for heart disease are based on short-term, 10-year risk estimates,
which are heavily dependent on age and gender, researchers said.
Therefore, younger people and women tend to be excluded even if they are
leading a lifestyle that puts them at high risk later in life.

The new calculator has been designed to identify such people and
predict how many years they can expect to live before they have a heart
attack or stroke, based on the growing body of evidence showing that
there is a long buildup to heart disease, said the researchers from the
board of Joint British Societies’ consensus recommendations for the
prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3). [Top 10 Amazing Facts About Your Heart]